With my recent loss, I had thought about, and seen other people, decentralising data. Luckily I’ve already got an email and RSS feed backup in place.

As soon as my Laptop was out of order, I jumped onto my pobox.com account and redirected email to Gmail. Gmail will keep my mail flow going for a week or two.

Next I went over to Google reader and reset all my feeds. Previously I had exported all my subscribed Newsfire RSS subscriptions to OPML format, and imported it into google reader. Thats blogs and news covered. Google is storing a lot of our data, so for now thats a good thing.

I’m lucky my iPod has all my music still, so tunes and podcasts are covered

The judicious use of Del.icio.us means all my bookmarks are already online.

This online decentralisation of my data should hold me out till I get the laptop repaired. Looks like with minimal effort, I am able to function without the laptop as an IT worker bee. It just goes to show how web2.0 is no longer a buzz word, but standard practice. Data out there, in communities.

On the theme of iTunes recovery, I had purchased iPodRip to get my music to the laptop. It didn’t work as advertised for me – The iPod Recover feature imported the songs to some temp folder, but never put them into iTunes. 2 hours later I had finished manually importing my missing 257 songs from the iPod into the CCC backup drive. A waste of $20? I will wait till the support team get back to me before I conclude that.

I’ve learned from your lesson, and have since implemented those fail safes you mention. The only reluctance I have in doing so, is letting google control so much of my electronic life. But since they offer free IMAP, and have other cool features like gmail, reader and calendar, the practicality outweighs any conspiracy theories I may hold around google’s surreptitious mass control of the market 🙂

With the addition of my own local imap server as detailed here to sync and backup copies of work (exchange) mail and gmail, there’s not much else to de-centralise. Well, calendaring is still a bit of a no hope at the moment so things could improve there …

Anyway, sorry to see u lose some data, I think all of us geeks have experienced that pain, and sometimes via someone else’s misfortune it reminds us to get off our asses and backup more frequently!

PS. you may find this app handy for backing up multiple iPhoto libraries (when u buy your new macbookpro 😉 ) and also syncing libraries between different ipods …http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/

Google’s very large market Capitalisation ensures they do have mass control of the market. There shares were USD$670 each last time I looked!
If I think about their products I use:
feedburner
google maps
google earth
google
reader
calendar
gmail
then that shows potential for a lot of data mining that goes on with ones net usage.
It’s the price we pay!